J1N Games

“One Button Game Design”, is the idea of simplicity in game design as well as development that results in the most fun video games.  The best video games of our era are all done with anywhere from 0 to 1 button.  This does not include an 8 way directional joystick (up,down,left,right,diagonals) as part of the buttons, but only the a button pressed to perform an action.

An example would be you click the mouse button to shoot a gun in a FPS on the PC which is only 1 button.  In fact any shooter’s main action “Shoot” is done with one button, and that is the part of the game that is the most polished and well done.  Another example would be in an RPG you hit 1 button to execute an action, or  in a platformer you are pressing jump which is 1 button.

Every good game out there has one single great action that is defined by one single button press.  The idea of “One Button Game Design” came to me while I was at the arcade “Nickel City” in Chicago.  There I saw some old woman over 40 years of age playing Gauntlet Legends on Arcade, and she sat there just mashing the attack button over and over, never pressing anything else.  Hour after hour she sat there dropping coins into the machine.  From here I realized that simplicity in game design is what creates masterpieces.  Look at the smash hit casual game “Peggle” it uses only 1 button “shoot the peggle ball”,  Super Mario Bros. mostly relies only on 1 button “Jump”.  Donkey Kong relies on “Jump” again one button.  Classic Beatemups like Streets of Rage can be played by only pressing one button.

FPS shooters are only played with one button “Shoot”.  RTS games are played with one button “Mouse Click”.  Diablo was played with only 1 button,  MMORPG’s can be played with one button.  Now a days too many games are becoming too complex and overrunning the player with too many options and things to worry about.  There is no reason a player needs to know a 3 tier attack system with 5 different input buttons, and 30 different items for their class of character and so on and so on.  Games that over-complexify their own games are usually the ones that don’t shine in the light.   Game Design should be focused around one thing and one thing only: “What is the point of our game?”  If the point is to shoot badguys, then shooting badguys had better be the best part of the game and all of that can be done in 1 or less buttons.

Game Development should also be the same way, there shouldn’t be some complex process to making games.  You should just need to hit “build” (one button) and go. Games should have a standardized way of being made: tools, graphics, ai, systems, models and everything can be specialized and streamlined in such a way that it no longer takes developers 18 hour work days to complete a video game.  I know what crunch feels like and I don’t think its right.  Working 12+ hour days for most of the year to only churn out a mediocre product is not good development practice.

Something is missing.  Something is wrong.  Developers and Publishers should learn, that squeezing as many hours out of your worker as possible will not create a better game, just as adding more buttons and more features to a game won’t make it any better.  There have been amazing games that have been created and are not complex at all, they only do one thing, but they do that one thing VERY WELL.  So I am now making it my mission, to find that perfect game, that perfect development philosophy, and the perfect game design that is encompassed all by one single action,  ”One Button Game Design”.